February 29, 2004
First Sunday of Lent
Psalm 91
Luke 4:1-13

This week, I was one of the first to see the new Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ. The controversy over this movie’s graphic violence, scriptural accuracy and anti-Semitic tone caused me to hesitate, but I decided to see it anyway and hoped that it might not all be true.

The movie opens with a scriptural quote from Isaiah 53:6, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all."

The movie begins in the garden of Gethsemane as we watch the events of the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life unfold before us. In the garden among the shadows we find Jesus praying to God. His face is damp from tears and sweat and he looks frightened. As he prays, a dark cloaked figure appears nearby and begins to talk with Jesus. As the figure emerges from the shadows, its ashen and androgynous face seems ghostly. The figure tempts Jesus to turn away from his praying – to turn away from God — but Jesus resists as he falls to his knees. Just then, a snake emerges from below the figure’s cloak and slithers over Jesus’ outstretched hands. This is a signal that this hooded figure is indeed the devil, returning "at the opportune time" as promised, to confront Jesus.

But I must admit I found myself chuckling at the arrival of the devil throughout the movie, as if I was watching a cartoon caricature–pointy ears, red suit and pitchfork–arrive on Jesus’ shoulder. This depiction of the devil–the personification of evil–I found distracting in the movie. It makes for good drama, but it distracts us from recognizing the many faces of evil.

The clash of the cosmic forces of good and evil is a major theme in the Gospel of Luke. It begins in today’s reading as Jesus is tempted by the Devil in the wilderness and concludes in the garden during the passion. Each confrontation serves to raise Jesus to mythic status–as the hero of a cosmic struggle between God’s forces of good and the Devil’s evil brigade. Yet, if we are going to let this mythic confrontation speak to what is real then we must look not with our eyes at this story but with our hearts to acknowledge the evil that Jesus was really up against. The real question for us could be, what are the real forms that evil takes and how are we inspired to respond in the name of Jesus Christ?

The season of Lent, which began with Ash Wednesday this week, is a 40-day journey through a wilderness leading to Easter. We already know the wilderness. It is life. And for these 40 days, we walk with Jesus through the desolation and despair, through the beauty, through the bodies, through the emptiness and through the wildness of life. Often, Lent is a time of facing personal demons–a time of intensified spiritual discipline and practice. As a result, it is tempting to have a very cerebral and psycho-spiritual Lent. Yet the Jesus we are joining today in the wilderness, the Jesus we meet in scripture, must overcome more than personal or mythical demons. He confronts and challenges the oppressive structures and systems of an unjust world order. We can see the roots of that even here in the wilderness as Jesus is tempted three times by the devil.

The first was the temptation to turn stone to bread

We see the results of the use of self-serving power all around us. The people of Haiti are especially on my mind today as a country ravaged by the abuses of self-serving power. From Jean Bertrand Aristide’s tolerance of corruption and violence within the police, to the rebel elite who threaten a coup and at this moment are in Port-au-Prince, to the United States, who has withheld much needed humanitarian aid to preserve its image as the defender of democracy. The result of self-serving power for Haitians has been violence, poverty, hunger, and now a chaotic capital without its leader.

Jesus responds to this temptation saying…"People do not live by bread alone." Not only does he resist the temptation to be self-serving, but his words also remind us that true justice is more than a crust of bread for the hungry, but a society where all basic needs are met. While Jesus would applaud us for feeding the hungry, he would not also ignore the systems of poverty that keeps them coming to the soup kitchens. While he would praise us for sheltering the homeless, he would challenge us to change systems of care that let so many fall through the cracks.

For the second temptation, the Devil shows Jesus all of the kingdoms of the world and says, "all this can be yours if you worship me."

Jesus is wandering---yet to find his path, his authority

The face of evil in this case is the persistent threat of our fears and the

authority given to them. It doesn’t take much for fear to grab hold not only of individuals but of communities and countries. There are signs all around us that the authority of fear is alive and well.

We see it in:

Pre-emptive war in the name of national security

The denial of the civil rights of Arab Americans

The proposal for a marriage amendment to the constitution

The gentrification in our neighborhoods

The violence and intimidation in our justice system

Jesus’ response to fear is claiming faith in God. Claiming faith is an act of social change. Resisting the temptation to act on fear by standing on the firm foundation of faith challenges society to be accountable beyond itself. Jesus holds his people accountable to his Jewish faith, represented in his quotation of scripture from the Torah. The verse he quotes comes right after one of the most important Hebrew prayers known as the sh’ma and echoes its sentiment. "Hear O, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." He returns to the bedrocks of his faith when fear threatens and invites us all to find that place where are roots are deepest, find that deep bedrock and draw strength from that place to face fear. And just as personal fear can fan the flames of systemic fears like racism and homophobia, in Christ we see that personal faith can inspire collective hope.

For the third temptation the Devil takes Jesus outside the wilderness to the pinnacle of the temple (ironically where James the brother of Jesus was supposedly thrown down). The devil asks Jesus to jump suggesting that, according to a verse in the Psalms, he should be saved from harm.

This is an obvious foreshadowing of Jesus’ death–testing Jesus’ resolve to trust God even to the point of death.

One of the critical lines in the movie The Passion of the Christ comes during the endless scenes of Jesus’ torture at the hands of the sadistic Romans. Jesus flashes back to the last supper when he was sitting with his disciples and says, "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." (John 15:13) The movie casts no doubt from the first moment to the last moment in the movie that Jesus is prepared to die. Unfortunately, exactly what Jesus is dying for is not so clear. Judging from the scriptural quote at the beginning of the movie, Mel Gibson thinks he is dying for you and me–for our sins and our failures. This is called atonement theology–the belief that Jesus died sacrificially for us so that we might be free of the bonds of sin. Absent from the gospel according to Mel Gibson is any notion that Jesus stood for a just society or the reign of God and was probably killed as much for his political and social activism as for any Messianic claims made about him.

According to the gospel of Mel Gibson, God must be a punishing God that requires the torture and death of Jesus in exchange for forgiveness and grace. But this is not the God that Jesus speaks of in the wilderness nor the God in which I believe. Jesus says to the Devil’s challenge, "It is written, do not put the Lord your God to the test." Jesus again aligns himself with God, suggesting that God’s vision is greater than any one life.

Therefore, for Jesus’ death to be redemptive to me, the promise of personal salvation is not enough. So what if I am "saved" when millions of people lack their basic needs world wide. Jesus died challenging the systems of oppression during his time, speaking truth to power and standing up for God’s vision of a just world. I believe Jesus’ death is redemptive because it calls for an end to the structures of oppression, the hate and fear, the domination and destruction, and signals the beginning of the reign of God.

As we begin Lent together, we have the opportunity to walk closely with Jesus again — to invite his spirit to awaken our conscience and inspire us to practice compassion in our homes, in our communities and in the world. This year, let your practice be one of compassionate action, aligning yourself with God’s work of overturning the systems of oppression. Let us stand with Jesus in solidarity with the suffering of the world. This is the Christian path. Our road to Easter this year goes through Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Our walk with Jesus to the resurrection goes through Washington. Our journey of faithful practice goes through the streets of Oakland and the schools of Berkeley this year. For "we" cannot know justice until "they" know justice, I cannot have hope if you do not have hope, and the world will not know justice if we don’t stand up with Jesus and resist the temptations of evil.

Amen.